The central character/monster in Steve's scary story is named Cropsey, who lives in the mud underneath the campsite. This shares similarity (and a name) with an actual urban legend out of Staten Island, New York, about a madman with a hook hand named Cropsey who lived under the ruins of an abandoned asylum and preyed upon children.
The title refers to the phrase "It was a dark and stormy night," which was first used by Victorian novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton in the novel 'Paul Clifford' in 1830. Later it became a cliché for long and ponderous writing and was often used by Snoopy in the comic strip 'Peanuts' when he was writing his novels.